Ralph, Revisited
by Indus Belethil
Summary: Ralph finds himself in a mental hospital at age 70, although he doesn't know it. Pauline-who-is-Piggy keeps him company, and helps him find the closure he needs with Jack.
1. I

Author's note: Yeah, so this was written concerning the fact that the book ends without a lot of closure. It's an assignment for my AP English class, but I thought it was an interesting idea, so therefore I'm sharing. :D

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Ralph faced the water, feeling the familiar spray of salt against his bare skin. A lazy summer-afternoon sun looked down upon the writhing blue sheet that stretched out below, and the rugged-looking boy averted his eyes. The sharp light that glinted off the waves made them burn. A cursory glance across the landscape told him that at the moment, he was alone. 

Several men and women dressed in uniformed white stood staring calmly through the window. Momentarily unconcerned with the clipboards that rested against their sides and underneath folded arms at their chests, they watched intently.

The object of their collective gaze was a man of about 70. He was the only living thing behind the door, seated at a table that shone as white as the lab coats of his current guardians, surrounded by four walls of the same hue. The faint smell of sterilized soap hung in the air.

Barely moving, the old man sat in his chair and stared at the blank wall across from him. Some of the ones with the clipboards took a quick note of the frequency of his breathing, although one could hardly tell he was doing it at all. Others wondered what it was he was seeing, sure that it was anything other than what was truly there. They continued their silent vigil, watching as if from another realm as the man shifted slightly, smiled to himself, blinked his eyes, and stood. Someone's digital watch beeped, and with eerie synchronization the white-clothed group turned and toted their clipboards to another door. Today's evaluation had ended.

Ralph was in a reflective state of mind as he shuffled along the beach. His eyes adjusted to the softer quality of light and stopped burning from the harshness of the sea. Moving steadily toward the huts, he saw the jungle resting silent and shadowed on his right. The boy hummed part of a tune he remembered from someplace far from his body and father from his mind, making up his own melody when shortly he forgot how it went. _I wonder how the others are getting along_, he thought, suddenly aware of the length of time he'd been gone.

As Ralph neared the huts, he could see two figures busying themselves around the fire pit - one considerably smaller and more agile than the other. From this distance, their activities were not discernible; it was through the predictability of routine that Ralph knew: Piggy and Simon were building the supper fire.

The hallway was clear, the evaluators having moved to another sector of the ward. A meek and portly intern, who wore glasses and a nametag that labeled her "Pauline," crept toward the old man's door from her accustomed place behind the desk. Bearing a pastry on a crumpled paper plate, she turned the cold metal knob and tentatively entered.

Ralph happened upon the clearing just as Simon was finishing stacking the wood for the small cooking fire. It was easier now that they no longer needed a large signal fire going day and night. Rustling in the nearby foliage heralded Piggy's emergence. With his customarily shy way of moving, he dragged the cleaned carcass of a pig into the clearing.

Pauline timidly set the pastry on the table. The old man looked at her as if she were an old friend and smiled. She felt some of her apprehension slipping away and found herself smiling back.

"See, Piggy? I knew you could do it. It turns out we don't need Jack after all." Startled by such a random comment, Pauline wondered whether she should say anything. The intern held her awkward smile, relieved when the man busied himself at eating the pastry. It only remotely seemed odd the way he ate it - tearing at it with his teeth like it were a piece of meat...

Ralph, Simon and Piggy sat around the fire. Darkness crawled across the horizon, slowly gathering itself around them. Holding the meat, dripping wondrously over his fingers, Ralph paused before biting into it. "See, Piggy? I knew you could do it." He smiled approvingly and looked through the dancing flames at his wise friend, who was already proudly enjoying his supper. Piggy said nothing, but returned the smile eagerly.

Pauline considered it better not to ask why the man had called her Piggy, realizing that he had probably not meant it as an insult. Besides, patients' mentalities were generally fragile enough, without some unnecessary comment to confuse or enrage them. She fought to remember what had been written on the chart outside of the door. Pauline couldn't sit there for too long without having to say something to the man, and it might help to know something about him. But it wouldn't do to leave the room just to find out.

Thankfully, the information came to mind: the man's name was Ralph Lennon. A schizophrenic.

In the following months, Pauline frequented Ralph's room more and more often, until it became a daily routine. Something about the man, his almost childish disposition perhaps, despite his age - which was anything but young - intrigued Pauline. Or Piggy, as she was to him. It felt queer to think about it, but the intern often felt more like she belonged here, in this room with the oddly adolescent old man named Ralph, than she did with the hospital staff. She felt a connection with Ralph that was so strong it made other relationships seem abnormal in comparison. Although true that they were living in parallel realities, Pauline always loved retreating from her world, filled with insecurity, to the one which existed in Ralph's mind.

Setting the customary pastry on the over-sterilized white table, Pauline asked, "Where's Simon?" and entered Ralph's world.

"You know him, Piggy. He likes to go off by himself. To think, or something." Ralph sighed, leaning back against a log, contented with the warm feeling of the meat that filled his stomach.

Pauline nodded, playing Piggy, imagining the jungle and beach around her as she had begun piecing it together picturing it in her head long ago, finally able to appreciate the landscape as a whole. The snippets of conversation she'd had with Ralph had added up over time, enough to give her a surprisingly extensive awareness of her surroundings.

Ralph suddenly grew thoughtful. Frowning slightly, he wondered aloud: "What d'you suppose happened to Jack and the others?"

Pauline ran through a mental list of all of the boys she had come across in her conversational excursions with Ralph. Jack Merridew, with his ugly red hair and freckle-plastered face popped up among a sea of faces swimming through her thoughts. It was a game she played sometimes, when she was alone and could think of nothing else, to imagine what the boys would have grown up to do when they got back to England after the war. Just as often, she debated if they were even ever real people.

"I dunno," said Piggy, after a moment of hesitation, "Maybe he grew up and went into the army."

Ralph screwed up his face. "He's not old enough to be in the army. But I'll bet he still goes hunting."

Pauline leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table and putting her chin in her palms. "Ralph?"

"Hmm?"

"Why didn't you get on the ship?"

Ralph shifted contemplatively. He stared at the ground and played with the shreds of cloth that clung to his legs which must have once resembled shorts. He felt as if he were about to say something that had been bottled up inside of him forever. "I wasn't like them," he confided, looking up into Piggy's spectacled eyes. "Neither were you. Or Simon. I couldn't leave either of you here, besides. And when the ship came, I couldn't find you." Ralph glanced down again, speaking now more to himself than Piggy. "I wish it didn't have to be that way..." Remembrance brought tears to his eyes, which he quickly wiped away. "I wish I had time to talk to Jack - there were some things I'd have liked to have said."

Pauline, who was Piggy, decided solemnly no to push the issue. Getting up quietly and leaving Ralph to his thoughts, she stepped off the island and into the hallway with the concrete resolution that she was going to find the real Jack Merridew.


	2. II

_Author's Note: Chapter two, and the last installment. Hope you enjoy. (I forgot to mention in the first chapter that this wonderful fic is written in collaboration with my good friend Amelia.)_

Jack walked haltingly down the hallway, unsure exactly why he had agreed to come. A thousand shallow reasons why he should turn around and leave flitted through his mind, but somehow he made his body continue moving forward. Memories pounded through his brain, surfacing in time with his pulse, which was beating faster as he neared the desk. The white halls of the hospital made him uneasy and claustrophobic, but he realized that he owed this to Ralph for what he'd almost done. Swallowing the annoyingly large lump in his throat, he came within sight of the desk. He assumed the lady standing expectantly behind it was the one he'd talked to on the phone.

Pauline stepped into the hallway with her hand extended and walked warmly toward Jack. She truly believed it a miracle that she had found this man, the Jack Merridew that she many times had half-doubted was one with reality. That he had actually consented to come and see Ralph was quite another story; Pauline's head swam with the magnitude of such an accomplishment.

Ralph sat with Simon in his quiet place among the butterflies, staring out at the former haunt of the Lord of the Flies. After the other boys left, Ralph had seen no need to keep it around. What was a gift to a beast who was never really there?

Yawning, Ralph reclined against the bed of creepers. He closed his eyes and focused on the barely audible hum of bees in the distance, and started to feel himself slipping into sleep. A rustling in the jungle behind him and to his left disturbed his placid state of consciousness. He felt that Simon was no longer next to him, and opened his eyes, confused. Where he might have expected to see Piggy, Ralph found a boy with freckles and a shock of red hair staring back. Alarm propelled his body involuntarily a few feet backward, and Ralph searched his clouded mind for what he should do. Jack still stared, but made no motion forward. Ralph stared back, tensed for flight, waiting for something terrible that loomed in inevitability.

Although it seemed a longer time had passed, Piggy followed Jack a few seconds later.

Jack looked back at Pauline, who followed him into the room. The haggard man he saw sitting at the table looked little like the Ralph he knew in that terrifying, turbulent time of their boyhood, but the chubby girl assured him with a nod that it was. She made comforting motions with her hands, noticing that his body was tense with what must have been an incredible rush of recollections and thoughts.

Piggy crept forward, soothing Ralph's nerves with gestures that said, _Don't go anywhere, Ralph. It's going to be okay. He just wants to talk_.

Jack eased himself into the chair. His smile was awkward but there was none of the former hatred in it. Pauline had stressed the essence of Ralph's condition, telling Jack to remember that Ralph was still on the island. That being a place that Jack had left far behind, it would be difficult going back.

Jack sat on the ground, leaving some distance between himself and Ralph, clutching the choir cap with the gold pin in his lap. There was no paint, no knife, and no evidence of Jack the Hunter in him now; it was as if they had just arrived. "Hello Ralph," said Jack, clearing his throat with slight discomfort.

"Hello," Ralph returned curtly, still somewhat frozen with surprise. Piggy stood in the shadows of the hanging creepers, obscured in darkness, yet a comforting and very real presence to Ralph.

"Do you..." Ralph choked, unable to continue.

The eyebrows on the ugly freckled face perked inquiringly. "Do I what?

Remembered pain shot through his body as the boy searched for the words he had for so long wanted to say. Ululations sounded in the back of his mind. "You've been gone for a long time, Jack.

"Yes, a very long time."

"Do you ever think about..." Ralph searched for a sentence. "...what happened on this island?

"You mean the hunting and the beast?" Jack sat in his chair and imagined himself as a freckle-faced twelve-year-old, doing his best to play the game.

"That, and Simon and Piggy." Ralph looked into the shadows, trying to find the spot where Piggy had been, finding that he had retreated farther into the jungle. He wasn't keeping his distance because he was afraid, but because this wasn't his conversation. Piggy had become a part of Ralph internally, he realized, understanding that he wasn't alone now, and never truly had been, even when Piggy went away. The wise friends lived in his conscience.

"Sometimes."

This wasn't the Jack that ran through the forest with his knife and tainted the jungle with the blood of innocents. He had changed. He had learned. He had grown. Ralph saw him differently, considering a possibility that he hadn't ever thought of before: he might be able to forgive Jack for the terrible, unspeakable things he had done. Maybe.

"Why did you do it?" Sudden emotion brought tears to Ralph's already burning eyes.

Jack silently prepared the answer to the question he knew had been coming. "I was a hunter, Ralph. Not a leader, not like you. I couldn't get them to like me. I needed something different, something that they wanted. I wanted to be chief, to make the rules, to have the conch." He saw the powdery explosion of the coveted shell in his mind. "I found out I could take them from you. Ralph, I hated you because you were better than me," he confessed, letting tears of his own leak down his face. "Simon and Piggy got in the way."

Pauline watched from the window as both old men reverted to childhood. Neither was Jack or Ralph, or the chief or the beast, but the child in everyone, that doesn't want to be left alone, with the monsters in the darkness.

"There was never a beast, Ralph.

"Yes there was, Jack... Simon knew. He tried to tell us."

"No, I made it up, the little 'uns made it up."

"It was us, Jack."

Jack had known the truth, after the bloodlust faded away and he saw the world again, with its grownups and its society. _He _had been the beast, but he chose not to admit it until now. A part of him had always held on to the knife and the paint, the hunting, an excuse to be a monster. It had all been a game, until now. Jack silently asked Piggy and Simon for the forgiveness that Ralph had given him. He washed the last of the paint from his body, dropped his knife into the swirling waters that had claimed two bodies of his innocent friends, looked into Ralph's eyes, and finally saw himself.


End file.
